New features at ElasticHosts: firewalls, FTP upload and more

It’s been a busy summer here at ElasticHosts! We’re happy to announce some significant new features for our customers:

Firewalls: You have always been able to run software firewalls inside your OS, and we still recommend that for complex firewalling requirements. But we now also offer a firewall in front of your VMs, which you can configure to block ports before they reach your VM, for extra peace of mind. You can enable and configure firewalls on the configuration page for each server.

FTP upload: We’ve added support for uploading ISO and drive images directly into your account using FTP. The username is your account UUID and the password is your secret API key. These can be found on the profile page in your account. The server is ftp.elastichosts.com, where the zone is lon-b (London BlueSquare), lon-p (London Peer1) or sat-p (San Antonio Peer1).

Choose your subscription dates: You can now specify the end date for your subscriptions, letting you sync up all your items to end at the same time and pick the time of month to pay your bill, which should make life more convenient. Remember that if you are on recurring billing we will take your payment 7 days before your subscription is due to expire.

Burst everything: You can now choose to burst all ElasticHosts features, including IP addresses, VLANs, and firewalls, which were previously subscription-only — making your use of ElasticHosts more efficient.

PDF invoices: On the billing page in your account, you can now right click on the payment lines in your transaction history and download your invoices in PDF format, which may be better for filing or printing.

Alternative email addresses: On the profile page in your account, you can now set up extra email addresses to receive our notification emails, so you don’t have to rely on a single email address.

UPDATE 3rd November 2011: There were so many new features that when we wrote this post we forgot to mention one! You can also now run multiple VLANs on a single server. This can be handy if e.g. you have a server in your account set up as a firewall and want to have multiple private networks behind that.